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Peering in the windows of the bus, I could see that it was fitted out with a kitchen, a bed and a sofa facing the ocean. It was quite posh for a surf camp, but it was also locked, so I scouted around for a place to pitch my tent. Back up against the dunes, I found a flat piece of ground with a nice view of the reef. I unhitched the trailer and left it there, then rode back up the track to ask permission to camp.

The first house I came to was a small whitewashed cottage with red shutters and a gray slate roof. In front of the house bricks of peat were heaped up like cord wood. There was a car in the drive, but no one came to the door when I knocked. Calling out, I heard a someone call back from the fields beside the road. Then I saw the gangly figure dressed in blue coveralls walking over to greet me.

Tom McCloud looked to be in his late thirties. He had thinning hair and sea-blue eyes nearly hidden by a permanent squint. He explained that the land along the coast was owned by some boffins in London and was used for common grazing, so camping would be OK. He also showed me the peat he had cut in May and June. There were two car-sized piles of the black soil, nearly dry now and cut into book-shaped bricks.

He put one of the bricks in my hand. "They're about three times this size when we cut them," Tom said. "An they shrink down to this when dry." The brick was exceptionally light, with a weight roughly equal to a similar volume of Styrofoam.

Tom McCloud was a crofter -- a man of several trades -- who kept some sheep, cut peat and worked in a woolen mill in Stornaway. A few evenings each week he attended computer classes at the local community college. "Because," he said, "ya never know when it might come in handy."

We chatted for awhile about the Internet and livestock and Tom introduced me to his mother who also lived in the cottage. We shook hands before he returned to his hayfield and I got on my bike. "If ya need anything," he called after me, "some water or a cup of tea, just knock."

Barvas was a lovely spot and the weather, though overcast, was dry. I camped there for three days waiting for the surf to improve, but it never did. Waiting, I decided, would be my new strategy: the sitzkrieg. Most travel, after all, is about waiting. You wait for a bus, train or boat, and when you're on the boat, train or bus you wait to arrive. At your destination you might wait for the weather to improve, or wait for some friends to show up, or just wait around for something to happen. It's how you fill the time while you're waiting that makes travel interesting.

I broke camp on a Saturday morning and loaded up the trailer for the ride south. I planned to do all the major islands in the Outer Hebrides from north to south: Lewis, Harris, North Uist, Benbecula, South Uist and Barra. The only other constraint imposed on the trip was my multipart ferry ticket (a Hopscotch pass) which would expire in a month.

The moors in the northern part of Lewis are bleak, treeless places. Apart from the insects, the only moving things on the moors are the sheep that wander everywhere and clouds of starlings that rise suddenly to wheel against the sky before disappearing again into the dark heather. It has an end-of-the-world feel to it that is unrelieved by the often wet and stormy weather.

However, this particular edge of nowhere was part of the British Empire, so it was obsessively well mapped. The Ordnance Survey maps put most other topographic maps to shame. I made good use of my OS map to ride down every little track that led to a promising point or bay. No doubt that on a decent swell, much of the western shore of Lewis would be working. That had to be left to the imagination though, as there was no swell.

At Carloway, a tiny settlement on the west coast, I turned off the main road and followed the signs to the Garenin hostel. The Garenin hostel is one of four in the Western Isles run by the Gatliff Trust. I had heard the Gatliff hostels were cheap and rustic; as I later learned they were also havens for all types of curious travelers.

The road ended at a construction site where cluster of whitewashed stone huts was being rebuilt above a rocky cove. This had to be the old crofter's village of Garenin, Gearrannan in Gaelic, but I couldn't make out where the hostel would be. I asked one of the workmen on a scaffold, a stonemason laying up a mortarless wall, which was the hostel and he pointed to a long, low building with a thatched roof.

The door was open and I ducked under the lintel to step inside. There was a kitchen area with two big tables, a sink and a few gas rings all warmed by an old coal stove. Dusty bunkrooms held down either end of the building and there were two bathrooms in the middle. Some backpacks slumped in one of the bunkrooms, but there was no other sign of habitation.

I moved my gear inside and made a cup of tea. It was a comfortable place where I could stay through the weekend. In the Western Isles Sundays are deadly quiet. Most of the inhabitants of Lewis, Harris and the Uists observe a severe brand of Calvinism that decrees Sunday shall be a day of spiritual reflection, churchgoing and, above all, No Fun. Consequently all the shops and pubs are closed on Sundays and even the swings in the playgrounds are padlocked.

Contemplating the long waveless weekend made me thirsty, so I went back outside to ask the stonemason directions to the nearest pub. "There isn't one here," he said. "The nearest one's about four miles away on the road to Callanish."

It was only five in the afternoon and four miles didn't seem too far to ride for a beer. I left the trailer behind at the hostel and took off down the hilly road, past lochs and sheep and churches until I came to the hotel. Apparently, I was late: the farmers and fishermen in the hotel bar were already deep into their Saturday afternoon cups. I got a pint of the Orkney stout and a wee dram and settled in to watch MTV with the other celebrants. Most of these guys were past the point of making small talk, so I ordered a bowl of Scotch broth and watched the telly. Something called Ibiza was happening. It was an annual Woodstock-type event held on a sunny island overrun with naked Euro-youth. It looked like fun; I wondered if they had surf on Ibiza.

When I got back to the hostel I saw that the other guests had arrived. There was a couple from France and a couple from Wales and a sunburned Swiss woman who had ridden in on her bike. Later on, the warden stopped by to collect the lodging fee, £5 a night. The coal stove was going and the workmen had gone home for the weekend. Certainly, this was the best place to spend a Sunday.

The Sabbath broke warm and clear. It was the kind of sparkling day that becomes rare in the islands as the calendar tips toward winter. From a chart tacked to the wall of the hostel's kitchen, I learned that during Lewis's wettest month, December, there are an average of 25 days of rain. Outside, the sunlight turned the water in the vest-pocket cove below the village a Caribbean blue. Walking along the rim of the cove, I could only see the faintest pulse of a swell. It looked like a good day to go for a ride.

As the other guests set out to walk the trails that thread through the hills around the shore, I filled my water bottles and got back on the bike. I would ride to a small cove north of the village that I had missed the previous day. Except for a pair of barking dogs, the roads were quiet. With only 22,000 inhabitants on Lewis and Harris combined the roads are never exactly crowded, but on Sundays they are silent. It was eerie: Carloway seemed alive the day before and now it was deserted.

Weaving around a clump of sheep parked in the road, I crested a hill and looked down at the cove. There was something happening in the water that looked like surf. As I drew closer I could see regular lines of waves breaking over a sand bottom and two vans in the parking lot with surfboards on top. This was most unusual: I hadn't seen another surfer since I left Thurso.


Surfing the Islands, Part 3